esxi on HP Microserver - RAIDed Hard drives

[jdlp]

Hi

I have 4 hard drives:

1 - ESXi OS

2 - VMware image data store

3 - 1.5TB RAID1

4 - 1.5TB RAID1

The RAID1 is hardware, but esxi dont seem to pickup the logical drive. It only picks up the two physical 1.5TBs.

Is there a way to get the logical drive registered that will not involve wiping the data?

The idea is that all Guest OS's will map to the logical drive and use it as a file store.

Thanks

J

[wobbe98]

I suspect that the microserver uses the same raid controller as the DL120 servers uses.

These are bios raidcontrollers, aka fakeraid. So this is not a real hardware raidcontroller.

The O.S. needs a driver that works with the bios, and VMWare doesn't have this driver.

[jdlp]

thanks for the response.

Is there a work around? Is there any way i can set up RAID1 on my hp micro esxi server?

[a_p_]

I doubt it. The only way you can use RAID1 is to get a supported hardware RAID controller. If you want to go this way, make sure you get one with BBWC (Battery backed write cache), since this makes a huge difference in performance.

If you want, post the specifications of your server (model, configuration) to see what would fit into it.

André

[jdlp]

Ok thanks.

I may consider raid in the future.

Is it possible to set the two 1.5TBs up so that all my vmwares can access them as file stores? Ideally I do not want to have to wipe them.

[a_p_]

... access them as file stores?

Can you please explain what you mean? Local disks are usually used/formatted as VMFS datastores to store virtual machines.

Regarding the current setup: I can't tell you whether it is possible to reconfigure the 2 disks in a nondestructive way. You will have to consult the server's user manual, but I don't think there is a way this can be done.

André